Genetics

🇺🇸James Watson

Science

1928–2025

"If you can't be criticized, that's very dangerous."

🇺🇸Francis Collins

Medicine

1950–1921

"... God must also be an incredible physicist ... there is this phenomenal fine-tuning of the universe that makes complexity and, therefore, life possible."

🇮🇳M. S. Swaminathan

Science

1925–2023

"Developing countries can leapfrog several stages in the development process through the application of bio-technology in agriculture"

🇺🇸Joseph Goldstein

Philosophy

b. 1940

"The more we can be with our own difficulty, our own pain, the easier it is to be with the pain and difficulties of others."

🇺🇸Craig Venter

Science

b. 1946

"Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table."

🇬🇧Francis Crick

Literature

1916–2004

"Both of us had decided, quite independently of each other, that the central problem in molecular biology was the chemical structure of the gene."

🇺🇸Jeffrey Friedman (political scientist)

Science

b. 1954

"Why, if the liberty of a human being to own another should be trumped by equal human rights, the liberty to own large amounts of property should not also be trumped by equal human rights?"

🇬🇧David Suzuki

Education

b. 1936

"We now have access to so much information that we can find support for any prejudice or opinion."

🇬🇧Paul Nurse

Medicine

b. 1949

"Ever since Sir Isaac Newton's times, scientists have worked in the same sort of way:"

🇺🇸Rudolph E. Tanzi

Education

b. 1958

"Our choices from diet to outlook to emotional state directly alter our neural and gene activity at every moment."

Gregor Mendel

Science

1822–1884

"1913 Catholic Encyclopedia entry, "Mendel, Mendelism"

"The overriding supremacy of the myth has created a widespread illusion that the theory of evolution was all but proved one hundred years ago . . . Nothing could be further from the truth."